Pathways: How digital design puts children at risk
Using avatar (test) accounts posing as 13-year-olds, researchers found children were directly targeted with harmful content — including material promoting eating disorders, extreme diets, self-harm and suicide — within 24 hours of creating an account on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok. Child accounts also received contact from unknown adults directing them toward further harmful content.
Executive summary
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Commissioned by 5Rights Foundation and carried out by research agency Revealing Reality, this report combines interviews with digital product designers and children with a novel ‘avatar’ methodology — creating child test-accounts on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok and tracing what content pathways the platforms’ design surfaced. It establishes a direct causal link between specific commercially-driven design choices (recommender feeds, discovery features) and children’s exposure to harmful content, predating the DSA but foundational to 5Rights’ later platform-compliance research.
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